Now with two brain cells to rub together

April 28, 2008

Pay or Die

LAKE JACKSON, Texas -- When Lisa Kelly learned she had leukemia in late 2006, her doctor advised her to seek urgent care at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. But the nonprofit hospital refused to accept Mrs. Kelly's limited insurance. It asked for $105,000 in cash before it would admit her.

Sitting in the hospital's business office, Mrs. Kelly says she told M.D. Anderson's representatives that she had some money to pay for treatment, but couldn't get all the cash they asked for that day. "Are they going to send me home?" she recalls thinking. "Am I going to die?"

Hospitals are adopting a policy to improve their finances: making medical care contingent on upfront payments. Typically, hospitals have billed people after they receive care. But now, pointing to their burgeoning bad-debt and charity-care costs, hospitals are asking patients for money before they get treated.

Hospitals say they have turned to the practice because of a spike in patients who don't pay their bills. Uncompensated care cost the hospital industry $31.2 billion in 2006, up 44% from $21.6 billion in 2000, according to the American Hospital Association.

The bad debt is driven by a larger number of Americans who are uninsured or who don't have enough insurance to cover medical costs if catastrophe strikes. Even among those with adequate insurance, deductibles and co-payments are growing so big that insured patients also have trouble paying hospitals.

. . .M.D. Anderson says it went to a new upfront-collection system for initial visits in 2005 after its unpaid patient bills jumped by $18 million to $52 million that year. The hospital said its increasing bad-debt load threatened its mission to cure cancer, a goal on which it spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

The change had the desired effect: The hospital's bad debt fell to $33 million the following year.

Asking patients to pay after they've received treatment is "like asking someone to pay for the car after they've driven off the lot," says John Tietjen, vice president for patient financial services at M.D. Anderson. "The time that the patient is most receptive is before the care is delivered."

M.D. Anderson says it provides assistance or free care to poor patients who can't afford treatment. It says it acted appropriately in Mrs. Kelly's case because she wasn't indigent, but underinsured. The hospital says it wouldn't accept her insurance because the payout, a maximum of $37,000 a year, would be less than 30% of the estimated costs of her care.

Tenet Healthcare and HCA, two big, for-profit hospital chains, say they have also been asking patients for upfront payments before admitting them. While the practice has received little notice, some patient advocates and health-care experts find it harder to justify at nonprofit hospitals, given their benevolent mission and improving financial fortunes.

. . .Federal law requires hospitals to treat emergencies, such as heart attacks or injuries from accidents. But the law doesn't cover conditions that aren't immediately life-threatening.

At the American Cancer Society, which runs call centers to help patients navigate financial problems, more people are saying they're being asked for large upfront payments by hospitals that they can't afford. "My greatest concern is that there are substantial numbers of people who need cancer care" who don't get it, "usually for financial reasons," says Otis Brawley, chief medical officer.

Mrs. Kelly's ordeal began in 2006, when she started bruising easily and was often tired. Her husband, Sam, nagged her to see a doctor.

A specialist in Lake Jackson, a town 50 miles from Houston, diagnosed Mrs. Kelly with acute leukemia, a cancer of the blood that can quickly turn fatal. The small cancer center in Lake Jackson refers acute leukemia patients to M.D. Anderson.

When Mrs. Kelly called M.D. Anderson to make an appointment, the hospital told her it wouldn't accept her insurance, a type called limited-benefit.

"When an insurer is going to pay the small amounts, we don't feel financially able to assume the risk," says M.D. Anderson's Mr. Tietjen.

An estimated one million Americans have limited-benefit plans. Usually less expensive than traditional plans, such insurance is popular among people like Mrs. Kelly who don't have health insurance through an employer.

Mrs. Kelly, 52, signed up for AARP's Medical Advantage plan, underwritten by UnitedHealth Group Inc., three years ago after she quit her job as a school-bus driver to help care for her mother. Her husband was retired after a career as a heavy-equipment operator. She says that at the time, she hardly ever went to the doctor. "I just thought I needed some kind of insurance policy because you never know what's going to happen," says Mrs. Kelly. She paid premiums of $185 a month.

A spokeswoman for UnitedHealth, one of the country's largest marketers of limited-benefit plans, says the plan is "meant to be a bridge or a gap filler." She says UnitedHealth has reimbursed Mrs. Kelly $38,478.36 for her medical costs. Because the hospital wouldn't accept her insurance, Mrs. Kelly paid bills herself, and submitted them to her insurer to get reimbursed.

. . .After eight days, she emerged from the hospital. Chemotherapy would continue for more than a year, as would requests for upfront payments. At times, she arrived at the hospital and learned her appointment was "blocked." That meant she needed to go to the business office first and make a payment.

One day, Mrs. Kelly says, nurses wouldn't change the chemotherapy bag in her pump until her husband made a new payment. She says she sat for an hour hooked up to a pump that beeped that it was out of medicine, until he returned with proof of payment.

A hospital spokesperson says "it is very difficult to imagine that a nursing staff would allow a patient to sit with a beeping pump until a receipt is presented." The hospital regrets if patients are inconvenienced by blocked appointments, she says, but it "is a necessary process to keep patients informed of their mounting bills and to continue dialog about financial obligations." She says appointments aren't blocked for patients who require urgent care.

Once, Mrs. Kelly says she was on an exam table awaiting her doctor, when he walked in with a representative from the business office. After arguing about money, she says the representative suggested moving her to another facility.

But the cancer center in Lake Jackson wouldn't take her back because it didn't have a blood bank or an infectious-disease specialist. "It risks a person's life by doing that [type of chemotherapy] at a small institution," says Emerardo Falcon Jr., of the Brazosport Cancer Center in Lake Jackson.

Ron Walters, an M.D. Anderson physician who gets involved in financial decisions about patients, says Mrs. Kelly's subsequent chemotherapy could have been handled locally. He says he is sorry if she was offended that the payment representative accompanied the doctor into the exam room, but it was an example of "a coordinated teamwork approach."

On TV one night, Mrs. Kelly saw a news segment about people who try to get patients' bills reduced. She contacted Holly Wallack, who is part of a group that works on contingency to reduce patients' bills; she keeps one-third of what she saves clients.

Ms. Wallack began firing off complaints to M.D. Anderson. She said Mrs. Kelly had been billed more than $360 for blood tests that most insurers pay $20 or less for, and up to $120 for saline pouches that cost less than $2 at retail.

On one bill, Mrs. Kelly was charged $20 for a pair of latex gloves. On another itemized bill, Ms. Wallack found this: CTH SIL 2M 7FX 25CM CLAMP A4356, for $314. It turned out to be a penis clamp, used to control incontinence.

M.D. Anderson's prices are reasonable compared with other hospitals, Mr. Tietjen says. The $20 price for the latex gloves, for example, takes into account the costs of acquiring and storing gloves, ones that are ripped and not used and ones used for patients who don't pay at all, he says. The charge for the penis clamp was a "clerical error" he says; a different type of catheter was used, but the hospital waived the charge. The hospital didn't reduce or waive other charges on Mrs. Kelly's bills.

January 19, 2008

"Medical Credit Score" To Determine Your Health Care

This is why we need to get rid of every single one of these rat bastards who put a price on keeping people alive and healthy.

The folks who invented the credit score for lenders are hard at work developing a similar tool for hospitals and other health care providers.

The project, dubbed â€œMedFICOâ€? in some early press reports, will aid hospitals in assessing a patientâ€™s ability to pay their medical bills. But privacy advocates are worried that the notorious errors that have caused frequent criticism of the credit system will also cause trouble with any attempt to create a health-related risk score. They also fear that a low score might impact the quality of the health care that patients receive.

. . .Several published reports have described Healthcare Analytics product as a MedFICO score, computed in a way that would be familiar to those who've used credit scores. The firm is gathering payment history information from large hospitals around the country, according to a magazine called Inside ARM, aimed at â€œaccounts receivable managementâ€? professionals. It will then analyze that data to predict how likely patients will be to pay future medical bills. As with credit reports and scores, patients who've failed to pay past bills will be deemed less likely to pay future bills.

The idea sounds ominous to Pam Dixon, who runs the World Privacy Forum, which studies medical privacy issues.

"This is a bad idea and I don't think this benefits the consumer at all," Dixon said. "And what about victims of medical ID theft? Are we going to deny treatment to these people because they have a terrible MedFICO score?"

So which is it? Is health care a human right or a commodity reserved for those able to pay for it. The corporate pigs at the HMOs already have their answer, what's yours?

June 26, 2007

Take Two Rolaids And Call Us In Six Months

I am a very active 28 year old male, who exercises regularly (4-6 days a week),
does not use any tobacco products, eats organic foods whenever possible,
takes vitamins, gets enough sleep, rarely even catches a cold and has
absolutely no history of disease. I recently applied for one of your
"Tonik" health plans because it was finally affordable to me. I have been
without health care for over 5 years and felt that the time had come for me
to make a financial commitment to my health. However, as a young, perfectly
healthy average male, I am appalled that you would deny my claim for health
insurance. After speaking with a representative over the phone, I was told
in a very polite tone and with no hint of sarcasm that I was ineligible due
to the fact that I had had Heartburn in the last 6 months; and furthermore
that I could reapply in 6 months (again with no hint of sarcasm or
acknowledgment of the fact that I clearly wouldn't state I'd ever had
Heartburn if it meant no health care).

Needless to say, I find it insulting and ludicrous that such a benign
symptom as Heartburn can deem me uninsurable by even just one of your plans
Not to mention that I received an email stating that I should apply to the
California Major Risk Program. Major risk of what I ask you? (rhetorically)
Not only are you compelling applicants to lie about seemingly innocuous
symptoms that nearly everyone experiences from time to time (I challenge you
to find any member of society who doesn't experience Heartburn occasionally
from spicy foods or even minor food allergies), but you are standing
hypocritically against the very reason that we are forced have health
insurance in this country. If I can't get health care without insurance
(alas I am not a millionaire), and I can't get insurance to obtain health
care if I need it, then to whom and for what does said insurance serve it's
purpose?

All in all, it's kind of cute how this individual thinks corporate leeches such as Blue Cross/Blue Shield exists to help peons like him instead of making sure their pockets are kept lined with green. This is part of the reason Michael Moore's Sicko is going to be such a phenomenon, because it will hit very, very close to home.

June 22, 2007

Health Care Is Expensive Because The Money Goes Into Research

In his new movie SiCKO, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore exposes the deplorable practices of the major health insurance and pharmaceutical companies in working to deny coverage to individuals who are insured.

The pharmaceutical industry and think tanks it backs financially are readying a multifaceted counteroffensive against Michael Mooreâ€™s film about the health care industry.

. . .The drug companies and their allies have been on their toes ever since the movie was being filmed, when they warned personnel to watch out for film crews from the â€œFahrenheit 9/11â€³ director. But in advance of the filmâ€™s release, they are upping the volume and the tempo of their activities.